Japan (part IV)

Never
was any people more naturally an artist people, never did such a race draw on a
field of sensibility, of enthusiasm and hope as rich as this one. As in Greece,
all the aspects of the universe are gathered into a small space—mountains,
lakes, forests, and arms of the sea that reach the heart of the land. As in Greece,
an immensity of light glorifies the sea and the sky. More than in Greece, the
spring deluged with flowers, the autumn with blood, the torrents carrying along
the leaves or the petals which they sweep from their banks, all imprint the
face of the soil with the sense of its inner life. All the climates to be found
between Scotland and Italy follow one another, from the north to the south, in
one continuous gamut upon which the identity of the geological formations
imposes an impressive unity.

Not
half a century ago, all the Japanese outside of the military caste were
fishermen or peasants. Although their soil was hard to cultivate, it was
fruitful, and they drew from it enough to feed themselves and, passing their
whole life in this great, tangled garden where the tints of the horizon and of
the flowers are so varied and powerful, living in the intimacy of the foliage,
the snows, the cascades, the fruit trees, and the ever-resounding hum of the
insects, they acquired a feeling for the forms and harmonies of the earth that
penetrated them and was part of their nature, from the humblest of the serfs to
the most powerful of the Daimos. Since the days of the Greeks, no other people
in its ensemble was ever an artist to the degree attained by the people of Japan.
Not possessing the power of illusion and the ennobling vision of the Greeks, to
be sure, the Japanese still recall them in a great number of ways—in the
seminudity with which they live their sturdy, healthy lives, in their optimism,
in their tendency to deify the forces of nature and to deify human heroism, in
the position of woman and of the philosopher-courtesans, in the masks of their
theater, and in their sinuous and linear conception of form. It is the land
where, in the springtime, husbandmen with their children and their women leave
the fields and, taking with them provisions for a journey that may carry them
twenty leagues from their village, go to see the blossoming of the cherry trees
at the edge of a torrent.

What is
strange is how this people, always open to external sensations and thus always
impressionable and vibrant, still remains master of itself. It resembles its
soil, whose gayety masks the subterranean fire which is always ready to send
forth its lava from a hundred volcanoes. It is an affable and smiling people,
and if it bursts into furious violence, there is always a methodical guidance
for these outbursts. Even its anger is reasoned, its fearful bravery is only a
lucid exaltation of its will. Its very emotion is stylized. And its art—whose
flight it accurately controls, whose lyric impetuosity it holds in clear-cut,
though sometimes abrupt, form—does not abandon itself to the overflow of the
marvelous instinct which directs it. Egoistic at bottom, and jealous of keeping
its conquests for itself, this people seeks to give only a transfigured image
of them.

This is
the only point held in common by Japanese and Chinese art, the two being as
different as the indented, violent, gracious islands are different from the
continent in its massiveness, oneness, and fixity. From the one to the other
there is the distance that separated Greece, the investigator, the lover of
forms in movement, from Egypt—almost completely immobile and in love with full,
subtle, and closed forms. To the degree that China is a single block, slow in
movement, secretive, and heavy, Japan—nervous, tense in movement like the
twisted cedars of its forests--is mobile and ready for innovation. The ancestor
worship, which the Japanese retained with the first ideas of morality that came
to them from their neighbor, was not, as in China, a homage to the immutable,
but the cult of the will power and the moral power with which the dead had
endowed them [Lafcadio Hearn, Kokoro].
Its effect may be seen in the love of the Japanese for children, who stand, in
their eyes, for an accumulation, of energy greater than their own, because the
children see a larger number of dead when they look behind them.

The
world of the Japanese is a moving world [Lafcadio Hearn, Loc. cit.]. The flowering of the gardens that they cultivate with a
restless passion has in it something of this mobility, which we see also in the
varying shades of their soil and in the profile of the mountains—which may
change at any moment as the mists trail in tatters, now revealing, now masking
the roofs of a phantom city, a lake, a dark stretch of sea spotted with white
sails, a brilliant cone that starts up into the light, the forests of black
pines, and the red forests of autumn. The soil may begin to tremble at any moment,
and the twilight changes with the fire of the volcanoes. Japanese art will set
itself to seize the characteristics of the object in movement, living, varying
its place and giving, despite its practically constant form, the sensation of
instability. It is as far from the mobility of impressionism, through which the
modern Occident caught the variations of light with so much vivacity, as it is
from the immobility of the Chinese. The Frenchman, working from nature and
adhering faithfully to direct sensation, ended by losing sight of the
characteristics of the object. The Japanese, composing from memory, sees
nothing but those characteristics. With the former, analysis reaches the point
of dissociation [With Neo-Impressionism] with the latter, synthesis reaches the
point of creating a system.

The
need of Japanese art to characterize things is so pronounced that our
Occidental eyes cannot always differentiate between a work of character and a
caricaturist's system. Caricature appears at the moment when the descriptive
element tends to absorb the ensemble instead of remaining subordinate to it.
But how is that moment to be determined? Character and caricature oscillate
around a purely theoretical point which all eyes do not locate in the same
place. For a Japanese eye, doubtless, character continues after caricature has
already begun for us.

What
carries the Japanese artist beyond the mark, perhaps, is the ironical turn of
his mind and, at the same time, his miraculous skill, which he does not
sufficiently distrust. When, in a flash, he seizes form in movement, he gives
an impression of infallibility, though one must hasten to add that this applies
more especially to his representation of the smaller animals. Save in the case
of Sosen, a savage and pure painter who lived in the woods like a wild
creature, so as to surprise clusters of monkeys as they huddle together on
great branches and shiver in the snow or the cold of dawn, the Japanese has not
understood the larger animals so well as he has the smaller ones, for his eye
is somewhat shortsighted and he does not easily grasp the idea of mass. He has
scrutinized the microcosms so patiently and sagaciously that through them he
has remade the world, as a scientist reconstructs it in the field of his lens.
He has seen the sun behind a spider web. Beside him, the Occident, in its
effort to bring everything to the level of man and to the general surroundings
of his activity, seems to have neglected what is at the level of the soil, near
our eyes, within reach of our hands—the things one can see only if one bends
one's neck and stares fixedly at the same point. only looking up to rest one's
eyes after too prolonged effort. The Occident saw form and lines, certainly,
and colors and their broad combinations, but it never saw a flower or a plant,
it never studied the slight, curling lines on water or the trembling of a leaf.
As it shut itself up in the house during showers, it did not see how the rain
claws space nor how it bounces from the puddles on the ground; and when it went
out of doors again when the sun shone, it did not study the dust that dances in
the light. But the Japanese has classified, as if in a science, the most secret
revelations of his burning curiosity. His eye is a little shortsighted, he is
very meticulous, he squats on his heels to tend his vegetables, to care for his
flowers, to graft his bushes, and to make war on hostile insects. The life of
his garden becomes the central theme of his meditation, which follows its
ironical path through minute anecdotes and little concerts of rustling leaves.
He has surprised the vast world in its humblest cares. He has visited the
aquatic flowers with the sudden flight of the dragon fly, circled around with
the bee from the hive to the glycine flowers, pricked the sugared fruit with
the wasp, noted the bend of the blade of grass beneath the weight of the
butterfly. Under the wing shells, as the insect raises them, he has heard the
transparent wings unfold, he has observed with passionate sympathy the tragedy
enacted by the fly and the toad, and it was in watching the circular muscles
roll in the flanks of snakes that he came to understand the silent drama of
universal hunger. He has had long vigils over birds standing in melancholy on
one long thin leg, and over their motionless intoxication with the freshness of
the morning sun. He has seen them stretching out their necks in their rigid
flights, and how they wink the round eyes that are flush with the sides of
their flat heads, and how their spoon-shaped or pointed bills preen their
varnished feathers. He has described the concentric circles that the water
spiders make on the pools, he has discovered how the reeds stand waiting when
the wind is about to rise, he has felt the agitation caused in gramineous
plants and in ferns by the action of dew and by their proximity to a spring.
And, having made all these tiny adventures a part of his life, he had only to
raise his eyes to the line of the horizon to be filled at once with the
serenity of the mountains in the light of the dawn, to feel peace come into his
heart with the fall of night, and then to let his dream wander over the
immobility of the distance or be cradled by the sea.